Line Breakage

Poets writing in Free Verse, pretty much have the freedom to stop a line at any time and begin the next whenever. Some of the time, the lines are totally different in word count and length. Sometimes it makes the poems very difficult to understand and read in a "flowy", "poetic" way.

When I think of poems, I think of rhyming words at the end of each line. Little is that the case now in the free verse writing. I feel like poets tend to end lines with the end of each thought. For example, with Ezra Pound's "In a Station of the Metro," even though it is only two lines long, the poem is a whole idea or single image.

The first line is sort of the start of the thought. The second line is then the completed description of the thought. There is nothing more to it than just that. The line ends with a comma, where I would assume there is a pause, a breath, a break in the reading. This, to me is more poetic and flows better than one like Gertrude Stein's stanzas. I feel like hers were almost made to look a certain way, instead of sound a certain way.

Yeats Changing of the Times

Over the fifteen or twenty years between Yeats' poems Adam's Curse and An Irish Airman Foresees His Death the subject of his writing changes dramatically. In the beginning, with Adam, Yeats writes about poets and how their work is not viewed like most other professions of the time. Although it may "take us hours", "stitching and unstitching", it is still better to go scrub floors or be a banker or schoolmaster. The women see their chore in live as "labour(ing) to be beautiful." A man, a poet, truly wants to love a woman with the ways of old, through romance and poems. Eventually though, love dies out. Eventually we all end up as lonely and hollow. This is the tale of a normal course of life and love, for a common man and woman.

In An Irish Airman Foresees His Death though, Yeats tells it how it is for the time period. His friend's son chose to serve his country and fight for freedom, and in doing so, gave up his life. He talks of being able to really please no one, not the enemy or the people for whom he fights, and feels like he wasted his previous time as well as the years he would have had if he had not chosen to fly. Basically in this time period, people were struggling to industrialize, and in doing so, many people had to leave their families and happy homes to work and serve in ways they may not have wanted to. In this instance, it seems as though this was an honorable thing for this young Irishman though.

Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson was a truly underrated poet for many years. Like many artists, her work was not fully appreciated until far after her death. Like many in the Romantic period, Dickinson stretched out and used her poems in a much different light than tradition called for. She used her poems to truly express herself and talk about her life. She used them to write about feelings and people she held very dear to her.

Her unusual use of dashes and capitalization added zest to her works. It seems she was fascinated with mysticism and mannerism, and her failure to conform became accepted by later generations of readers. A lot of her published works can be almost sung to the tunes of songs. Her language flows and smoothly leaves the tongue.

I am not sure what else I can say to reach my 250 word minimum except that I enjoyed her poems.

Keats Hand

John Keats wrote a poem called The Living Hand. Keats lived from 1795 to 1821, dying at the young age of twenty six. I do not know much about his values except that in his poems he speaks of power, love, money, health, and full life. In his poem The Living Hand, I think his audience may be to a specific person, but it does not specify. The situation is one of threat and immortal subconscious control by him on the person reading.

John Keats wrote The Living Hand in basically one long run on sentence with very little punctuation. He throws in a few commas and that is about it. I guess the commas are merely for taking a breath because they do not seem to imply to me any other sort of break in the action of the poem. I think this whole poem being one long sentence makes it very bold in the sense that it is direct and concise. It is not meant to be rhyming and "flowy". It is a blunt statement.

I thoroughly enjoyed this poem after reading it over a few times and finally getting what he was talking about. He is threatening the reader that if he were dead, he would haunt you until you prayed he were alive again so he would stay out of your dreams. It is very serious on one hand and sort of amusing on the other since I am an outside observer from two centuries later in the world.